Shirley Jackson Quotes

"Fear," the doctor said, "is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway."

An Eleanor, she told herself triumphantly, who belongs, who is talking easily, who is sitting by the fire with her friends.

If I am spared,” he always said to Constance, “I will write the book myself. If not, see that my notes are entrusted to some worthy cynic who will not be too concerned with the truth.

I am caught in a kind of wonder, I am still with joy.

Our house is old, and noisy, and full. when we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books; we also own assorted beds and tables and chairs and rocking horses and lamps and doll dresses and ship models and paint brushes and literally thousands of socks.

I looked at the clock with the faint unconscious hope common to all mothers that time will somehow have passed magically away and the next time you look it will be bedtime.

Don't do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup
of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone
else you will never see your cup of stars again

I hated them anyway, and wondered why it had been worth while creating them in the first place.

...Perhaps someday they would grow as dragons.

Each was so bent upon her own despair that escape into darkness was vital, and, containing themselves in that tight, vulnerable, impossible cloak which is fury, they stamped along together, each achingly aware of the other, each determined to be the last to speak.

It is not possible, I frequently think, to walk down the street as fast as you can and kick yourself at the same time.

I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.

Don't do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again; don't do it; and the little girl glanced at her, and smiled a little subtle, dimpling, wholly comprehending smile, and shook her head stubbornly at the glass. Brave girl, Eleanor thought; wise, brave girl.

"Nothing irrevocable had yet been spoken, but there was only the barest margin of safety left them; each of them moving delicately along the outskirts of an open question, and, once spoken, such a question - as "Do you love me?" - could never be answered or forgotten."

We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.